for fun and games

Amelia tried it herself. But her fashion line bombed. Now she's back, or at least her sensibility is. Fashion. Not for the faint of heart.

right next to teterboro

I'm not giving away too much, gosh maybe I am. On the other hand, think of Amelia researching herself; reading her biographies and the one her sister wrote. Wandering through the world remade. Ending up here of all places. . . so conveniently situated, right next door to an airport. Taking lessons. Getting back into the cockpit. But by day earning a living, eating in a diner, sleeping at a Y, planning and waiting and planning.
A woman who never took 'no' for an answer. And never looked too hard at what was pushing her, because why look when what you got for it was being Amelia.

We're made differently now. We move from the inside out. Our language is chock full of psychoanalytic jargon. Not a bad thing, not a good thing, a thing. She's in this world and the world matters. Wherever you live, whatever you see, everything you encounter makes you who you are. She's remaking herself and she can't stay the same. It's just not possible, we have to believe that we're mutable beings. Woody Allen said it once comically, sharks move or they die and what we have here is a dead shark. I still believe that human beings can change given a good enough reason. I believe that's part of what makes us special. I may often sound cynical, but I do hope. My father was an idealist, a dreamer, and I suppose that's where I get it from.

Anyway, here dear reader, a museum of sorts, a shrine to flight. . .

You say it's your birthday

Amelia started shaving years off her age early on in her career. Hard to believe that a woman who showed no outwards signs of vanity, cared. But she definitely did. Muriel said she would have hated growing old. She was like the rest of us I suppose. Though some hate it more than others. And society presses us to capture youth and bottle it. We're no longer even allowed to joke that we're thirty nine, that's ancient. Actresses who I admire feel the need to medically alter their looks when they're half my age. Older ones show up and I can no longer find them. They've become someone new, when they wake and look in the mirror who do they see? How do they know themselves? And how do they emote when they can't smile or frown?

Each line is a road-map back. Without them, we may seem freshly minted, but we also lose something in the process. Yes, it's my birthday. Again. Glad to have one. Glad to move on. I look in the mirror and see the same person who was there yesterday, that at least is familiar. There's enough in the world that isn't. We are born into a family, some of us cling to it, others make a new one.


In her early letters Amelia is filled with enthusiasm. She agitates and cogitates and manages to forget certain salient details, like Muriel's imminent arrival for a visit. "Muriel is coming the weekend with me, I think. Reg has asked me to so many things and I haven't gone once so finally consented to go to a senior professional hockey game on Saturday-not remember at the time about Muriel. It is the game of season and he asked me a week in advance. Isn't that simple? I guess I'll cancel it." Later on, she manages to avoid Muriel's home in "Mudford" on numerous occasions. The name is meant to be cute, but it's hardly complimentary.

Amelia was a dutiful daughter, a generous sister who never let either her mother or Muriel forget her role. Someone had to be the caretaker, someone had to think about money . . .

You can't do everything or be everything, Amelia chose to take hold of what she loved most and stay true to it. She didn't seem to be overly empathetic, which is ironic considering her laundry list of early career choices; nursing, social work, teaching. Muriel was the empathetic one. Amelia found it hard to believe there were other ways to live. Or that anyone would willingly choose them. The irony is that Muriel was the one who ended up re-imagining her. Muriel was the one who insisted her sister was perfect, when she so evidently wasn't.

I think perfection is over-rated, yes, it's my birthday. I'm not perfect. Far from it. Balance, positives and negatives, those are what count most. And make life interesting.

Rebel with a cause or what makes sisters different? And are there regrets? I've had a few.

There is a pecking order. The older one escorts the younger one through life. They undergo many of the humiliations first. They focus the parents' attention and let the second slip through with much less scrutiny. The second, third and fourth time round parents get a chance to rejigger.Experience may prove that being over protective doesn't necessarily matter. Or that certain rules are just . . . well, absurd.

On the other hand, some parents stick to their guns even as the world changes around them. By the time I was a teenager, I saw there was only one way to avoid conflict with my mother. I lied to her. My mother told me that I shouldn't have sex till I got married, this from the woman who headed a family planning clinic and handed out contraception to everyone and anyone. She also told me that if I smoked pot I wouldn't be allowed to go to college. I wouldn't have had any fun at all if I'd listened.

Amelia's father forbade her from taking flying lessons. That worked out too. Yes, your parents only want to protect you from yourself, and yes yes yes, it's so hard to let your child go. I discover it myself with a son who wants to move three thousand miles away. It's gut wrenching, but necessary.

I wonder what Muriel's life would have been like if Amelia had lived. What sort of peace they would have made . . .certainly it must have been hard to be her sister. Not the least because Amelia wrote chiding letters and made it clear she was the boss. She wasn't just older, she was Amelia. Publicly Muriel made it clear she thought her sister a saint. Privately, I find it hard to believe she didn't have some doubts. Sisters do. They love each other, but it's never simple. Or easy. Being Amelia's sister was hard. She overshadowed Muriel. Then she disappeared.

I imagine what they would have said to each other, given the chance. I think it's a profound love you feel for your sibling. There's so much that you don't say to them, simply because they don't/won't hear. Or you're afraid of the response. What if Amelia could hear? What if Muriel could finally tell her? Think of the relief . . .think of the possibilities.

If you could make amends, if you could say the thing you never said, what would it be?
We all have regrets . . .even Amelia.

I think I can or why I write, god knows

I am on page 256 of the rewrite. The book as it stands is 397 pages long. That's not manuscript, so shorter. I think I can, I think I can. Why do I write? That's a question I often pose. I do it because it's what I've always done. I do it because I can't stop myself. I do it because on good days, it makes me forget everything except trying to form that perfect sentence, pushing and pulling and hoping that I can. I've been writing since I was five, first it was Pegasus, ah you say the flying horse, and then it was poetry, and after that novel after novel, short stories, articles, novels that were published, novels that languished. Life has a way of intervening and pointing out that certain things aren't as important as you thought. But this has retained its sense of urgency. I get up every day and go to the computer, once it was a typewriter . . . and write. Without it, I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

I had a friend who called it a hobby, god knows it's an expensive one. Expensive in terms of time and energy and emotional abuse. As for payment, hey, don't think you're going to get rich doing this. But why complain, no one said it would be easy. Really, nothing is. And if you get to do something every day that gives you pleasure you are lucky.

Amelia was lucky too, not at the end but in between. That's more than most of us ever get. I think you do make your own luck in part. You have to be ready when the opportunity comes. She was. You have to believe you can do this, whatever this is. I find it remarkable Amelia had such faith in herself. And inspiring. I only hope I can do her justice. I think she's someone who has often been underestimated, funny to say that really. She was wonderful and impossible, just like anyone else. I wonder why that's so hard to translate. . .even after all these years.

Big Bill Haywood, Amelia, the IWW and why Muriel might fly

I'm working on a chapter told from Muriel's POV. In it I conflate a lot of what I've read and yes, make up just a few things. But that's my right as an author. I'm not being arrogant saying that. We come to fiction to be surprised and transported. And we surely don't want the action in a novel to be predictable.

As an undergraduate I took a wonderful class on the Labor movement in the U.S. It covered the I.W.W. For those who don't know, they were the Industrial Workers of the World, communist sympathizers, progressives and way to the left of the A.F.L. or C.I.O. Without them, my guess is labor unions would have had a hard time becoming as powerful as they have. You need an outlier, FDR needed one too. In his case, the demon was socialism. Easier to press for change when the alternative is even more frightening to those who might stand in your way.

In her book Courage is the Price, Muriel mentions that Amelia attended an I.W.W. meeting. Muriel says she thought their basic demands reasonable. They wanted workers to have a living wage, retirement and health care. Today, these are still goals that are out of reach for too many. The IWW managed to brew a protest in 1923 even though most of their leaders were in jail or in exile. The San Pedro dockworkers struck and it became a cause celebre.

I think of Amelia having an opportunity to protest in the way I did; I marched with righteous passion towards the White House countless times. I was young enough to believe we could change the world or at least the misguided policies of our own government. I think Amelia would choose her own novel way of expressing dissent. And this one time she would take Muriel with her.

Muriel never much cared for flying. I want to know why. I want to imagine it, the two of them alone in the cockpit floating over Los Angeles. . .

idlewild for those who remember